The curtain rises, we go to begin.
On the bill tonight, once again, is the "human comedy".
The actor characters on the scene full of objects are all in place; suddenly a violent light there light up for a souvenir photo. But before the stage action the lights go out and the curtain falls. It gets ready another diorama immediately.
Giovanni Corallo, director, set designer and costume designer, with rigorous attention to the details he has laid out on stage the characters of him to tell one and a thousand stories, without history.
Indeed, his paintings immediately arouse a strong sense of theatricality.
Like a puppeteer, now good-natured and ironic, now heartfelt and thoughtful, he crams into the picture characters, animals and things, all of which can be traced back to an almost object-like presence.
And this makes his opulent, spooky or authoritarian ones surreal and almost ghostly figures. To this swarm of presences that clutter the compositions, almost a metaphor for too much evident and del too much told in the daily chatter, it contrasts with the fixity of the gestures of the gods characters, like crystallized in a disturbing suspension.
The result is an atmosphere of magical tension.
The underlying irony, with which the social rituals they celebrate are laid bare the affirmation and the dying of myths and which codify behaviors and roles in everyday life, however, does not exclude an intense and bitter participation of the author.
In fact, as even in the disguises dictated by the ephemeral, the essence of certain rituals is eternal need.
And it is therefore that his characters, while contemporary, have the charm of the archetype, which sinks its own roots in the comedy of art or even further back in the Plautian theater.
But behind the topical masks there is a different reality: the truth, in fact, is not in the picture of reality, but beyond.
And as in Dorian Gray's portrait, the mirror reveals what is hidden in the two paintings " In the sign of Gemini '', it reveals to the mother / bride the prostitute that she is in herself, and vice versa.
But a mirror is not always necessary to " betray " how much is submerged; the masking for how much attentive and vigilant, he cannot contain the pressure of truth or the sense of emptiness of conventions bourgeois.
And precisely the attention is focused on the bourgeoisie and its intrusive trappings.
Carpets, sofas, tapestries, paintings and various objects cover and make them asphyxiated home interiors, while jewels, precious fabrics, gloves, medals and more decorate the bodies.
The thought and the dream of these beings flow over the air and last in time as long as the picture on tv. In global village the TV rapidly builds and disintegrates its own " fictions " ;, only memory and awareness of reality allow to denude its mechanisms.
From memory as a cognitive tool of reality, the step towards historical memory is indispensable. The accumulation process up to the overabundant does not manifest itself perciò only in everyday life, but also in the piling up of now mythical and museified images.
Like the topical characters of certain social roles they hide something else from themselves behind them appearances, even quotes of works of iconography and famous artistic languages, become something else.
Precisely because, as De Kooning said, `` we all base our work on paintings in whose ideas do not we believe more " ;, Corallo wants to verify the foundations of current artistic making, comparing it with the mythical baggage of historical memory.
The changed coordinates lead to an ambiguous disorientation. The desire to retrace on the wire of memory the magic of some masterpieces, collides with the impossibility of joining them. AND as in dreams the reference to reality disguises itself as symbols, which combine or overlap, so these quotes they are contaminated; the original images thus become something else.
Behind the neoclassicism of certain perspective systems and the iconic frontality, yes manifests a profound anti-classicism. The chessboards of the floors become dangerously inclined planes or even, like in the " Queen with fruit " ;, optical dress.
The romantic and aerial fluctuation of certain Chagall figures becomes in his quotations grotesque mass of forms weighing on the sofa. But each time the quote takes on different meanings, in fact, one goes from the " recovery ", almost with archaeological doing, of a sacred Renaissance iconography to connote it of worldly meaning to the more direct quotation, but no less alienating than the picture within the picture.
Among the numerous petrified figures, depersonalized and grotesque even in their eroticism vulgar, they do I pass through some female figures, sensual as felines, sometimes mischievous or absorbed.
In the complex ambiguity of the symbols these women, kidnapped in intimate thoughts and dreams, they are perhaps the muses inspirations of the " swimmer " ;, which often crosses the upper field of the painting.
An expanse of water, De Chirico or Sironian landscapes dot beyond the horizon line this " sky of frustrated aspirations, of impracticable spaces.
Behind the apparent anti-intellectualistic simplicity of the tale lurk complex references in a continuous postponement and reversal of meanings. Absolute fidelity to values ​​too of painting represents a irreverent counterpart, with which Corallo designs and constructs images.
And as in treating the chromatic matter in various ways (from the smoothness of the volumes à plat until to arabesque or silky modulations of color) he lets himself go to the pleasure of the material itself and of doing artistic, so in his critical analysis of society he leaves the way to beauty. Hence the citation of the " Venus in the mirror " by Velasquez almost provokes a poignant moment melancholy, an " instant " of great intensity in the ominously distorting mirror of consumer society.
It is therefore not surprising that a painter with ancestry from English pop dreams of being invited " At dinner at home del Sevillano, the father of the painting within the painting.

The questions at the root of the text are infinite, and often in the context of the personal, in a creation problems, scruples and more: so complex is the definition of the unknown. To remember and reaffirm, until point is it mere exhibition? and from what moment does the " necessity " of the reference? and with which purpose? and towards what perspective?
And if it is true, as it is true, that "reality is formed only in memory", how said Marcel Proust, it is equally true that the latter can be articulated in a movement that from private and personal, yes easily shifts towards gender and collective; allowing the artist and this this is the case with Giovanni Corallo modes of expression and analogue references.
As in this exhibition, too. Corallo starts from an ascertainable past the of him and that of the same story of art giving memory an organizing role: of images, ideas and even of conscience, inventing a sort of iconic path - the " sense " of the work / painting than in the homologation reaffirms the relationship that painting has always had with itself, placing it in a topical context, too intermedial (the image of painting, and of him "being an image", on TV, between irony, paradox and affirmation.
And the world within us ultimately exerts a subtle and pleasant pressure outwards, in a crowded with characters, objects, environments, atmospheres, and sometimes in a language also ambiguous, but always linked to the meaning and modalities of painting.
Because Corallo continues and remains a painter, yesterday in certain assemblages sometimes also " metaphysicians " ;, yesterday the other in the revival of figural mimicry, today in this assimilation intelligent who "lays bare" in the shapes and colors, in the images and references, as well as in the contents.
The pink house, at this point, is not just the pretext for the opening moment of an exhibition in spatiality baroque, but also the privileged place, in which to play the adventure of the opposites, in unreality iridescent colors, and in the contemporary alternation of signs and figures, as in a intrigue which, however, does not he says and does not reveal.
Giovanni Corallo has from him the "Italian tradition" and not only that, and with it, or better with the codes of the painting (their transfiguration and modification), he invents a " game " not devoid of disturbance, at the limit of visionary and history, in which the quotation " how else to call certain archetypes, certain figures, certain objects, as well as certain other symbols that appear such as the extreme extremity (there is punishment allowed) of conceptualism.
And the " mystery " is in the very private room, scenery and place of the game (his implicit seriousness, and rigor of "his" rules of him), in which in the chasing of internal perspectives, the figures- interchangeable in roles, and sometimes even transformable show their " desire for poetry " in an alternation of pauses, of references minds (also that swimmer who crosses the surface of the work, as in an escape from the painting, between absolutely non-sinusoidal waves) and intentional ambiguity. The repetition is, of everything, different, in the audacity of an "experimentation" rational that cannot, and does not want to, disregard implicit aesthetic issues in painting.
Then we feel the sense of the apparition, and that sort of elaboration image manipulation always and clearly legible, but progressively developed until the deposition of the traces.
From myth to the recovery of the classic, to the even physiognomic recognizability of figures and emotions.
"Stop posing!", Shouts the photographer, thrusting his head under the black cloth, while the couple (spouses or lovers, who cares) hovers over the labyrinth of ruins and tapestry, of knights and ladies, of trompel'oeil and smooth sensuality.
There is no improvisation and there is no need to cheat (even the language adapts and yes refers to the pretext of game), as physical and mental spaces are populated with immediacy of the exercise of painting, i.e. of the unveiling of the symbolic moment beyond the language itself. As far as Narcissus, or rather his of him being in seventeen and passapollici.
But isn't the screen also a painting?
And the look becomes turbulent, beyond any smooth conformism, in the revival of that ancient " audacity " all personal that is based again on myth, archetype, writing and memory communication. There pervades a subtle eroticism. The pink house is inhabited by desire. And all on TV.